LOS ANGELES — Jessie Buckley won the Oscar for best actress for Hamnet at the 98th Academy Awards, March 15, becoming the first Irish actress to win the category. The victory capped one of awards season’s clearest arcs and turned a long, unlikely rise — from teenage talent-show finalist to one of her generation’s most fearless performers — into a landmark moment for Buckley and Irish film.
Jessie Buckley Oscar win puts Hamnet and Ireland in the Academy record book
The Academy’s 98th Oscars results confirmed Buckley’s victory for her portrayal of Agnes, the wife of William Shakespeare, in Chloé Zhao’s adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel. Reuters reported from Buckley’s hometown of Killarney that the win was celebrated in Ireland as the first time an Irish woman had won best actress, a distinction that immediately lifted the moment beyond a standard awards-night headline.
That mattered because Hamnet had been framed from its London Film Festival launch as a story of grief, tenderness and artistic transformation, with Buckley playing Agnes at the emotional center of a drama about family loss and the creation of Hamlet. By the time Oscar voters made it official, the performance had already been treated as the film’s driving force.
Jessie Buckley Oscar win capped a season that kept pointing the same way
Oscar night did not arrive out of nowhere. Buckley had already won at the Golden Globes and the BAFTA Film Awards, giving her campaign the kind of momentum that can make the final Academy result feel less like an upset than a coronation. In that sense, the Oscar did not rewrite the race. It confirmed what the season had been signaling for months: Hamnet gave Buckley a role big enough, raw enough and controlled enough to move from admired performer to outright industry standard-bearer.
The road from reality TV to Oscar night was longer than the headline suggests
Still, the most striking part of this story is how long the groundwork had been visible. A 2022 Guardian profile traced Buckley’s public beginning back to her runner-up finish on the BBC talent show I’d Do Anything, long before Hollywood started treating her as an awards fixture. Even earlier, Little White Lies called her turn in Beast a star-making one in 2018, and The Guardian’s 2019 coverage of Wild Rose captured the musicality, edge and unpredictability that kept pushing her career into harder-to-ignore territory.
That is why Buckley’s Oscar win lands as more than a tidy Cinderella narrative about a former reality-TV contestant making good. It reads instead as the payoff for a career that kept widening in plain sight: stage work, restless film choices, a first Oscar nomination for The Lost Daughter and then a performance in Hamnet that finally aligned critical admiration, precursor awards and Academy votes. For Ireland, it is a first in the category. For Buckley, it looks more like an arrival that had been coming for years.
